Dr Chris A Williams

Professional biography

• All aspects of the history of crime and policing since about 1750, especially concerning British and British colonial police.
• The preservation of the records of British police forces.
• The public history of criminal justice in the UK and beyond.
• The relationship between history and memory.
• The globalisation of policing practice.
• The history of the control room (lecture here).
• Public history, particularly as it relates to methods of communicating historical knowledge via broadcasting.

Research students

I have successfully supervised doctoral students working on the following topics at the OU:

• 'British Government Responses to Terrorism, 1865-1975'
• 'County Police Chief Constables, 1857-1914'
• 'The Public History of the UK Criminal Justice System'
• 'Narrative verdicts and deaths after police contact, 2001-2011'
• 'From Constables to Constabulary: Eighteenth and Early-Nineteenth Century systems of policing in Hertfordshire'
• 'Popular Representations of Crime: the 'Illustrated Police News', 1867-1938'
• 'Behind the front line: Non-confrontational responses to youth crime from the Manchester and Salford city police forces 1933-1963'
• 'The material culture of police archives'
   

Publications:

Books

Police control systems in Britain, 1775-1975: From parish constable to national computer Manchester University Press, 2014.

Police and Policing in the Twentieth Century (Ashgate: Abingdon: 2010) [editor] Vol.3 of History of Policing.

(with B. Godfrey and P. Lawrence) History and Crime (Sage: London, 2007).

Giving the Past a Future: Preserving the Heritage of the UK's Criminal Justice System (Francis Boutle: London, 2004) [edited collection].

Articles and chapters

(with Denise McHugh and Lucy Faire) 'Making manifestos for urban history: creative collaboration in a conference workshop'. in Urban History, Published online 2024:1-16. doi:10.1017/S0963926824000208

Risk on the Roads: Police, Motor Traffic and the Management of Space, c. 1900–50. In: Crook, Tom and Esbester, Mike eds. Governing Risks in Modern Britain: Danger, Safety and Accidents, c. 1800–2000. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 195–219.

'Police Governance - Community, Policing, and Justice in the modern UK' in Taiwan in Comparative Perspective, Vol. 3, 2010, pp. 50-65 [Read this online]

'British Policing in the Twentieth Century', introduction to C.A.Williams (ed) Police and Policing in the Twentieth Century (Ashgate: Aldershot: 2010) [978-0-7546-2954-2] Vol.3 of History of Policing.

'Policing the Populace: The Road to Professionalisation' in David Nash and Anne-Marie Kilday (eds) Histories of Crime: Britain 1600-2000 (Palgrave: Basingstoke, 2010). [978-0-230-22469-8] pp. 160-179.

'What's a 'back office' for? The case of policing' History and Policy, June 2010 [Read this online]

 'Labelling and Tracking the Criminal in Mid-Nineteenth Century England and Wales: The Relationship between Governmental and Creating Official Numbers' in Ann Rudinow Sætnan, Heidi Mork Lomell, and Svein Hammer (eds) The Mutual Construction of Statistics and Society (Routledge: Abingdon,  '2011'), [978-0-415-87370-3] pp. 157-171.

'Police filming English streets in 1935: the limits of mediated identification' Surveillance and Society 6.1 (2009) 3-9.
[Read this online]

'Ideologies, structures, and contingencies: writing the history of British criminal justice since 1975' Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique, 14.4 (2008) 59 - 84.

'Constables for hire: the history of private 'public' policing in the UK', Policing and Society, 18.2, (2008) 190 — 205.

'How it actually was'? A historian responds to 'On Historical Contextualisation' Crimes and Misdemeanours: Deviance and the Law in Historical Perspective Vol. 1, No 2, (2007)
[Read this as a PDF]

(with Georgina Sinclair) ‘Home and Away'; the Cross Fertilisation between ‘Colonial' and ‘British' Policing, 1921-1985' Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 35.2 (2007) 221 - 238.

'Rotten boroughs? How the towns of England and Wales lost their police forces in 1964.' in J. Moore and J.B. Smith (eds) Urban Corruption (Ashgate, Aldershot, 2007).

'I am not on the beat now, the New Police have come there.' – Using the Old Bailey Online to study the changing enforcers of the law in London, 1730-1834. Internet symposium on the Old Bailey database - February 12, 2006.
[Read this online]

'Police and the Law' in S. Berger (ed.) Blackwell Companion to Nineteenth Century Europe (Oxford, Blackwell, 2006).

(with Clive Emsley) 'Beware of the Leopard?: Police archives in Great Britain' in M. Proctor (ed.) Political Pressure and the Archival Record (Chicago, Society of American Archivists, 2006).

'The Sheffield Democrats' critique of criminal justice in the 1850s' in R. Colls and R. Rodger (eds) Cities of Ideas: Civil Society and Urban Governance in Britain 1800-2000 (Ashgate, Aldershot, 2004).

'Catégorisation et stigmatisation policières à Sheffield au milieu du XIXe siècle' Revue d'Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 50.1 (2003) 104 – 125. [Read an English version of this online]

'Britain's police forces: forever removed from democratic control?' in History and Policy, Dec 1st, 2003. [http://www.historyandpolicy.org/archive/policy-paper-16.html]

'Police surveillance and the emergence of CCTV in the 1960s' in M. Gill (ed.) CCTV in Perspective (Perpetuity Press, Leicester, 2003).

'Police surveillance and the emergence of CCTV in the 1960s' in Crime Prevention and Community Safety 5.3 (2003) 27-38.

'Counting crimes or counting people: some implications of mid-nineteenth century British police returns' in Crime, Histoire & Sociétés/Crime, History & Societies. 4.2 (2000), 77-93.

'Expediency, authority and duplicity: reforming Sheffield's police 1832 - 1840' in R. Trainor and R. Morris (eds) Urban Governance: Britain and Beyond since 1750. (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2000), pp. 115-127

Follow this link for podcasts and research papers in progress.

I am currently a member of the module teams for :

A883/A884 History MA

A327 Europe 1914-1989 War, Peace and Modernity

I am an active member of the History and Policy network. 

I am a member of the Advisory Board for the 'KRIMKNOW' project: 
https://www.jus.uio.no/ikrs/english/research/projects/crimknow/index.html